the thing about the throwaway lines in ptolemy's gate about bartimaeus taking a lioness's form because manes block peripheral vision and then the brief reveal a few hundred pages later that he was a lion when ptolemy was attacked and killed is that it's obviously devastating but for me it's more about what it reveals about so much of bartimaeus' narration. he doesn't linger on this connection explicitly. the implication is that so so many of the quick comments he makes have extremely similar stories behind them he's not even revealing in the footnotes, not necessarily bc he doesn't remember but because he finds them painful, or embarrassing, or unimportant. fucked up about a character so very old who is mostly willing to explicitly reference his history only for a quick joke or brag, nothing too real